


Come Again Some Other Day

by apatternedfever



Category: Ain't No Sunshine (song)
Genre: Gen, genderless naration, unspecified somegender/f crushing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2013-09-22
Packaged: 2017-12-27 07:12:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apatternedfever/pseuds/apatternedfever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a town where it never rains, there's a woman who talks to the sky. Well. Once there was, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Again Some Other Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Teaotter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teaotter/gifts).



> Dear recipient: I loved this prompt. I loved it before I got assigned it, and hopefully I did it justice. I was aiming for magical realism; I think I landed more in the realm of fairy tale, but hopefully you still like it.

It never rained when I was young.

I've lived in the same town all my life, and for the first seventeen years, I never saw it rain. We'd watch television, the kids in my neighborhood and I, and we'd see these people crying as thunder crashed, the torrential downpours outside their window, and it felt like watching an alien culture. We never heard thunder, we never saw lightning; we never counted to see which way the storm was going or raced to get home before the rain rolled in. Sometimes, on the hottest days of summer, we would get sunshowers. The wispy grey clouds stretched across the sky so thin that you could almost see the blue behind them, just waiting for them to blow on by. They never lasted more than a few minutes, and then the sun would be back to dry us off. We never bothered to go inside when they came. Why would we? We thought it was the sky's way of apologizing for the worst of the heat, when we were really young, and even when we were older, though we wouldn't have admitted to playing pretend with the world in that way anymore.

Those days, the sky seemed endless, and the world as clear as the blue above us. Those days this town seemed like a different world than it does now. Maybe the place where you're a kid always does, once you grow up.

There was a woman who lived in the middle of town, those days. Sixty years since I last saw her, and I still remember her being the most beautiful woman in the world. Maybe she was, and maybe the memory is colored. She was so young; but in those days, so was I, and she seemed so mature. The earliest I can remember, she was barely in her twenties and I was still in single digits. By the last time I saw her, she must have been in her thirties, but she still looked just the same.

She must have been a teenager when she came to town, but nobody knew anything about her parents. Rumors flew, as rumors will in a small place, especially when there's a stranger to fuel them. She was a runaway, survivor of an abusive home. She was on the run from the law, she killed them when she was just a child. She was older than she looked, she'd been on her own for a long time, years, decades, centuries.

One thing we knew: nobody lived with her. Her house was as clear and open as the sky above it. She left her shutters thrown open, summer and winter, day and night. In the mornings, she'd leave her door open as she made herself breakfast and tidied the house. You could see her moving about, catch snatches of song. Her neighbors used to talk about her low, lovely voice and wonder where she learned the strange songs she sang.

The house stayed open, but she kept to herself. If she passed you, she'd smile and nod and never say a word. We only ever heard her sing, but sometimes, she'd sit on her porch or her roof, or hang out the window of her attic, staring up at the sky. Sometimes we thought we saw her staring straight into the sun, her lips moving like she talked to herself. She always looked her best in sunlight. Some woman don't; they're flattered by moonlight, by candles. But something about the sun lit her up, made her shine.

She lived in the middle of town from before I was born, and when I was seventeen we were all in love with her. We hung around her neighborhood, soaking up every glimpse. We wrote her love poems -- some of the more ambitious left them in her mailbox. We don't know if she read them. We stared at the sky, trying to see what she was looking at. Our parents had long since told us not to stare at the sun, but some of us tried anyway.

We loved her. We wanted to talk to her, to touch her; sometimes we wanted to be her. We wanted her to grace us with the first 'hello' we'd hear from her soft lips, the first laugh out of her mouth. To be the person who learned her secrets, and to become one of them. We wanted to matter her. We wanted her.

And one day she left.

It must have happened overnight. One night we walked away, went for food and got distracted by friends and never got back to moon around her door. The next day we gathered after school, as we always did, and there was nothing. The shutters were thrown open, and nobody moved inside. Nobody hung out the window or perched on the attic. It took till the next day to summon the courage to try to knock, and that's when we discovered the door was unlocked. The furniture was left, but all clothes and personal objects were gone, leaving a house anyone could have lived in. Nothing to prove it belonged to the woman we'd spent day and night thinking of for years. Nothing to prove she'd ever been there at all.

Local legends step in there, stories from our parents, our neighborhoods, others who used to hang around her door. They say she's a witch, she flew away. They say she was a ghost, a drifter. They say the law caught up with her, or an old boyfriend, or the abusive parents some were so sure she'd run from. They say a lot of things when they don't know the truth.

All I know is this: We came to her door one day, and there was nothing there; we stayed past dark, past dinner, till we were dangerously close to missing our curfews, and then we drifted away, in ones and twos, dejected and in something like shock.

And I heard my first roll of thunder on the way home that night.

It rained all the next day. And the one after. For the entire week, it never stopped. Our parents shrugged and said it was bound to happen. They would talk about rainstorms when they were a kid; they'd question how long it really had been since one had come. They'd stop, then, stare out the window; they'd blink, slowly, like pulling themselves from a waking dream. Eventually they stopped asking.

We were young and adaptable; we learned to take our umbrellas when we left the house, learned the routes where the awnings would shelter us as we walked. We thought it was bound to stop soon. We'd get our sun back.

I was seventeen then; I'm nearly seventy now, and I haven't seen a day without rain since then. I don't remember what it was like. Only that it happened. That once, we lived in a town where it never rained, and now it's one where it rains all the time. That there's a beautiful woman who used to live in a house that still stands empty, and the day she left, the rain came in.

And maybe it's all coincidence; maybe it doesn't mean a thing. But I still walk by her house every day, just hoping to see some movement in those still-open shutters. Hoping that maybe she'll bring the sun back someday.


End file.
